Page 194 - Sport Culture and the Media

SCREENING THE ACTION || 175

the in-stadium experience. This is especially the case when that event, the
Olympics, constantly proposes a deeply mythologized link to the Games of
antiquity (Toohey and Veal 2000).
Emphasizing the (albeit diminished) distinctiveness of physically attending
sports contests should not, however, obscure the many different ways in which
spectator and screen can interact. The home can be rather more than an
isolated, privatized space for watching television sport. Viewing television is
typically a highly sociable activity (Morley 1992), and live television sport
is especially well suited to the construction of collective social encounters.
Again, research during the Sydney 2000 Olympics (Rowe 2000b) revealed that
TV sport can encourage all manner of carnivalesque behaviour. Within house-
holds there was much intra-familial, inter-generational and peer interaction,
with the opportunity to invite neighbours and friends into homes to watch the
Games, eat, drink and converse. According to Dayan and Katz (1992: 205),
media events ‘transform the home into a “public space”’, but they disapprove
of those sporting occasions when these small-scale social interactions spill over
into carnivalesque expressions of fandom:
The high holidays of football, soccer, and baseball – the Super Bowl, the
World Cup, the World Series, and so forth – are among the mainstays of
media use. Living-room celebrations of these games, and of the Olympics,
involve rituals of conviviality, knowledgeable exchange, and a level of
attention and sociability far exceeding that of everyday television. This
sociability can reach disastrous heights, as in the parody of communitas
which has marred recent European soccer matches and in the explosions of
enthusiasm which may now be seen in the streets of cities whose teams
have just won a televised game; television spectators pour out of their
homes and jam the streets in frenzied cavorting and motor carnivals.
(Dayan and Katz 1992: 207)
Setting aside Dayan and Katz’s rather moralistic, fun-defying tone, the social
phenomena that they describe – the flag-waving sports fans congregating on
the streets and the loud sounds of car horns – indicate that the domestic
environment, however handsomely served by widescreen televisions and sur-
round sound, cannot always satisfy the urge to take part in a grander spectacle.
During the 2002 World Cup, ‘Big-screen viewing became a major feature – for
example, an incredible 4.2 million Koreans took to the streets to watch their
national team’s victory over Italy’ (FIFA 2002). As sports spectators abandon
the home for the street, they also become part of the sports spectacle that,
ironically, is relayed by television back to domestic screens as additional, visible
evidence of the spectacular nature of the sports event itself. Such spontaneous
expressions of the desire of television viewers to demonstrate their sporting